Modular electronic packaging has recently come under the jurisdiction of international standards, in one instance Advanced Telecommunications Architecture (also referred to as AdvancedTCA). Telecommunications network equipment manufacturers can gain many benefits by using these standards as the basis for their modular platforms. However, these standards are not always optimal in important dimensions, for example scalability, modularity, density, power handling capacity and cost. Innovative packaging options are often the key to successful system deployments.
Since being ratified, many manufacturers have built products based upon the AdvancedTCA standard. At the highest level, the standard consists of a number of boards plugged into a chassis that contains an interconnect backplane, power distribution, and cooling elements. Traditional AdvancedTCA systems arrange 14-16 boards vertically across a chassis. As there is often a system or wire center level requirement for front to back airflow, cooling air generally enters the chassis from the bottom front, blows up through the boards, and exits through the top rear. Typical vertical chassis's have two central fabric boards to provide system interconnect, and 12-14 node boards providing control computing, packet processing, signal processing, storage, and I/O functions.
For some applications, 14 boards are too large of a system. These applications are better served with a smaller number of node boards, typically 2-6. Unfortunately, arranging only a handful of boards in the vertical orientation, as in the larger chassis, wastes substantial rack space in unused board slots. For these systems, horizontal chassis are often used. The horizontal configuration rotates the collection of boards 90 degrees counterclockwise. Airflow in such a system, because of certain constraints, is typically right to left (or vice versa). Unfortunately, problems exist with the right to left airflow used.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is an apparatus or system configured to accommodate the use of horizontal chassis that does not experience the problems that currently exist.